1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of calendaring and scheduling systems and more particularly to the field of time zone processing when scheduling meetings, activities or appointments in a calendaring or scheduling system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Calendaring systems have formed the core component of personal information management software and firmware applications for decades. Initially, a mere calendar display, modern calendaring systems provide scheduling and alarm functions in addition to full integration with contact management, time entry, billing and project management applications. The typical calendaring application minimally provides a mechanism for scheduling an event to occur on a certain date at a certain time. Generally, the event can be associated with a textual description of the event. More advanced implementations also permit the association of the scheduled event with a particular contact, a particular project, or both. Furthermore, most calendar applications provide functionality for setting an alarm prior to the occurrence of the event, as well as archival features.
Several software products include support for Calendaring & Scheduling (C&S). Known C&S products include Lotus™ Notes™, Microsoft™ Outlook™, and web-based products like Yahoo!™ Calendar™. These products allow one to manage personal events including appointments and anniversaries. C&S products also typically allow one to manage shared events, referred to generally as meetings. Electronic Calendaring and Scheduling software allows a group of people to negotiate around the scheduling of a proposed event such as a meeting, with the goal of selecting a time that allows most of the group to attend. Finding a common free time slot across multiple calendars can be challenging; but, the challenge can be compounded when different people in the group reside in different time zones.
Notwithstanding, conventional C&S products display date/time values only in respect to the time zone of the person performing the scheduling. In consequence, it can be difficult for the person scheduling an event to acquire an awareness of the typical available hours for all of the invitees to a meeting, since the person scheduling the event must first know the locations and time zones of all of the invitees, and must second compute the overlapping time zones. While this computation can be somewhat convenient where only a small number of familiar time zones are involved, the computation can become intractable when dealing with large numbers of geographies, some of which may be unfamiliar. For example, scheduling a meeting with participants across three time zones within the United States and four time zones across Dublin, China, India, and Japan can be difficult with time/date values provided only in respect to the local time zone of the person scheduling the event.